food for brains

window farms

emikos — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 20:45:13 +0000

I stumbled across this fantastic project while on the FoodCycles website http://foodcycles.org . The Window Farms project is the brain child of tech-artists Britta Riley and Rebecca Bray and demonstrates how DIY urban food farming can be take advantage of all year round.

Their website http://www.windowfarms.org is fantastic and there are tons of great process photos and images from their exhibition at Eyebeam in NYC. They’ve also posted a very comprehensive design for window farms that you can build yourself at home. To learn how to build one yourself, step step-by-step, visit http://our.windowfarms.org/2009/07/30/how-to-build-a-reservoir-system-window-farm/ and download the How To instruction guide. Seeing as I have two large windows, six months of winter weather approaching, and a love for fresh arugula, I may just be taking this project on myself very soon.

the typography of Ploeg

emikos — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 18:29:01 +0000

I love my friend Miles. Just the other day I was feeling as though I had hit a creative food wall. I was having trouble thinking of something worth writing about on Food for Brains, when along came Miles. Miles just got back from NYC last week. He went for the New York Art Book Fair hosted by Printed Matter, and brought back with him the most fantastic art/design cookbook. I got home from work late at night, saw it sitting out on the table with my name written inside it, and thought ‘Man, that Miles sure knows how to pick the most perfect present at precisely the most perfect time’.

The book is titled ‘A Typographic Meal to Celebrate the 75th Anniversary of Libelle’ and it was designed by the Dutch design studio/school Werkplaats Typografie. These fantastic recipe ‘graphs’ were inspired by the meals of traveling vegan hardcore punk-rock vegan chef Joshua Ploeg during his visit to the school in January.

Seasoned Nut and Lentil Bundt “Loaf” with Spicy Tamarind Sauce and Rhubarb Salsa; Soup of Greens, Corn, Slivered Almonds and Mixed Potatoes in mushroom broth; Baked Zucchini stuffed with pine nuts, creamy garlic filling, red onions and herbs with red pepper sauce are just some of the delicious examples from Ploeg’s blog http://joshuaploeg.blogspot.com/.

I love these recipes because unlike their colorful, glossy, mouth water inducing counterparts found all over every cooking section of your local book store, these recipes leave a lot to be determined, and therefore imagined. Like say, what temperature to (let’s assume) bake the green beans with toasted slivered almonds found on page five. Or, how about how to make or roll out the dough for the crust of the sweet carrot pie with caramel-praline ‘ice kreem’ and chocolate-rum sauce on page seven?

These graphs are an awesome throw back to a simpler time when you could bake a cake from a ‘jigger of milk’, and a ‘peck of flour’. Easy to say when you haven’t actually cooked a meal using hexagons and three dimensional pie charts as instructions, but they sure do look good.

Hello world!

emikos — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 01:45:01 +0000

Welcome to WordPress.com. This is your first post. Edit or delete it and start blogging!